The request comes as part of a motion asking a three-judge panel of the appeals court to continue requiring U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier to block payment of business claims until the appeals issues are resolved. In Barbier's Dec. 24 order that is the focus of the new BP request, Barbier said an injunction on the payment of claims would remain in place pending further action by two separate panels of 5th Circuit Court judges.

In separate filings, BP also has asked the appeals court to throw out another Barbier ruling that allowed non-profit organizations to count reductions in financial contributions following the spill in their spill-related losses for purposes of filing claims.

Those appeals were filed in opposition to three claims approved by the court-appointed claims supervisors. None of the names of the claimant organizations were made public.

In its bid for an injunction, BP argues that Barbier ignored the instructions of the three-judge 5th Circuit panel in a Dec. 24 order that found BP's arguments were "judicially estopped," a legal term meaning that the company had earlier argued in his court an opposite theory about the proof needed to pay claims.

In his ruling, Barbier pointed out that the settlement agreement that BP signed, and later defended before him during a fairness hearing preceding its approval, included language listing businesses that because of their geographic proximity to the Gulf of Mexico or the type of business they conduct "are not required to provide any evidence of causation."

In his decision, Barbier pointed out that only one member of the 5th Circuit's three-judge panel, Judge Edith Brown Clement, fully supported BP's position on causation. A second judge, Leslie Southwick, said in a separate part of the opinion that he was asking only for a better explanation of Barbier's reasoning.

But Barbier also questioned whether that holding was legal, since a different three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court has not yet ruled on a broader appeal of the fairness of the settlement agreement.

While BP also joined that appeal, its latest challenge to Barbier's ruling was made before the original panel, which has been more receptive to BP's position. One 5th Circuit judge, James Dennis, is hearing issues on both panels, and has opposed Clement's holding concerning causation.

"The time is now ripe for this court to provide a binding interpretation of the settlement agreement's causal-nexus requirement for class membership and to issue a permanent injunction barring the (court-supervised settlement program) from issuing or paying awards to claimants whose alleged injuries are not traceable to the spill," BP lawyers argued in their new court papers.

It pointed out that in his ruling, Barbier did order the claims administrator to rewrite rules he had earlier approved that govern the accounting procedures used in determining claims, a change BP had also demanded.

"That error, however, caused hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) of BP's money to be improperly disbursed," BP's attorneys said. "The district court's continued refusal to enforce the causal-nexus requirement will, unless corrected, likewise impose further vast and unjustified costs on BP."

In a separate motion, BP asked the 5th Circuit to hear its appeal of Barbier's December 2012 approval of the non-profit claims rule along with appeals of three claims that were granted under the rules.

According to BP's motion, the claims administrator "issued a policy decision that allowed grants and donations received by non-profit entities to 'typically be treated as revenue' when measuring the compensation due to non-profit entities seeking recovery under the (business economic loss) framework.

On April 24, Barbier issued an order denying BP's appeal of the non-profit rules as part of an order denying several BP appeals, and has since then refused to hear appeals of individual non-profit claims that the company has apppealed.

In a separate motion, BP argues that in a May 20 order, Barbier also blocked the company from filing paperwork supporting its appeals of such claims awards in the district court, which would mean the information would not be available for the 5th Circuit to review. The motion asks permission to file that information directly with the appeals court.

According to a list of the type of information it would file accompanying the motion, the company wants to place into evidence a variety of income tax and accounting records for each of the non-profits.